The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (34 page)

In the King James version of the Bible there are many references to trees. In Isaiah 6, verse 13, there is a reference to an oak, and something called a teil. In Genesis another oak. But earlier bibles—particularly John Wycliffe’s of 1382, and the Coverdale translation of 1535—call trees by much more specific names, and in these two cases by a name still known and fairly familiar—the terebinth,

a tree of moderate size
, Pistacia terebinthus…
a native of Southern Europe, Northern Africa and Western Asia, the source of Chian turpentine, and a common object of veneration; also called
turpentine tree,
and
Algerine
or
Barbary mastic-tree

Terebinth appears in the Catholic Douay Bible of 1609 too—yet there seems no mention at all, anywhere, in the King James. One has to wonder: what did the translating teams set up in Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster have against turpentine? A harmless solvent, used by painters: surely, no harm to anyone.

Loosestrife

A curious misunderstanding surrounds the origin of loosestrife which, quite simply, is

the name for two common herbaceous plants resembling each other closely in growth (upright and tall) and habitat (margins of ditches and streams)

The two are
Lysimachia vulgaris
, the Yellow Pimpernel (or Creeping Jenny); and
Lithrum Salicaria
, the Purple Loosestrife.

They were thought to be named after the Greek farmer Lysimachus, who first discovered it; as it happens the two elements of his name do mean
to lose (luein) strife (mache)
. But Pliny notes that oxen made to eat the plants became magically more docile and quite content to draw together. It is now thought the name never came from the farmer at all, but from the effect the plant had on ancient Greek farm animals.

Pellucid

Here is a good example—told with this lovely word
pellucid
—of how some words appear to be synonymous, but in fact and on close examination are not.
Pellucid
, from the Latin combination for
through
and
light
, is used to mean

having the property of transmitting, or allowing the passage of, light; translucent; transparent; clear

But does it mean the same as
transparent
? In its
designatum
(the word’s essential qualities), yes. In its
connotation
(its associated features), yes. But in its
range
of actual use—perhaps not. A deal between a government department and Microsoft can be described as
transparent
if all can see its details: but it could hardly be
pellucid
, which as a quality tends to be restricted to water and crystal and kinds of glass through which one can see, in actual, physical fact. One’s writing may be
pellucid
, true; but that is about as far, figuratively, as the word’s range will go.

Chance-medley

This wonderful legal word—the language of law offers up a profusion of delights—is ancient (first seen in 1494) and is defined as an

accident or casualty not
purely
accidental, but of a mixed character. Chiefly in
manslaughter by chance-medley (
for which later writers have used
chance-medley
itself
)
: “the casual killing of a man, not altogether without the killer’s fault, though without an evil intent; homicide by misadventure; homicide mixt
.”

The hyphen is not always present: an 1855 commentary on Shakespeare wonders out loud why Hamlet, after murdering Polonius, himself dies “by chancemedley.” But properly used, with hyphen or no, the word always implies tragedy as consequence: the
OED
warns us not to use the word as merely indicating happenstance.

Cacoethes

I cannot make up my mind whether this is one of the uglier of English words because of the way it looks and sounds, or one of the more delightful simply because of what its principal sense means,

an “itch” for doing something, as in the
insanabile scribendi cacoethes (
the incurable passion for writing) of Juvenal

Unkinder translators have suggested that Juvenal’s confession was actually to an incurable itch for
scribbling
, rather than for writing, and that a
cacoethes
is more of a mania for authorship, a fanatic eagerness to be rushed into print, than any deep longing for literary truth. Such would be born out of the other meanings of
cacoethes
, which include
an evil habit
or
an obstinate or malignant disease
. Those senses, combined with the word’s look and feel, nudge me to think this is perhaps not a word to be encouraged.

Boustrophedon

On one of those more pleasant traveling moments when I had been seated near the front of a plane, the attendant informed me brightly that the way she moved her cart during the delivery of dinners to her passengers—first to the seat A1, then to B1, then A2, B2 and so on—was technically known as
boustrophedon
. She, like the word, was Greek; when I looked it up later, it did indeed mean

(written) alternately from right to left and from left to right, like the course of the plough in successive furrows; as in various inscriptions in Greek and other languages

The
OED
offers examples relating to writing. I see no reason why any such first-one-side-then-the-other kind of activity—shopping on the two sides of a street, looking for your car in the lot afterward—should not be dignified by a word which derives from a combination of words meaning
ox
and
turning
, and that was how the ancient Greeks ploughed their fields.

Read on

A Reading Excerpt from
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906

In his newest book, Simon Winchester
, New York Times
bestselling author of
The Professor and the Madman
and
Krakatoa,
takes an adventurous and informative look at earthquakes, as seen through the devastating 1906 quake in San Francisco
.

THE VIEW FROM THE MOON

H
AD ANY GEOLOGIST
been able to look down at the planet in its entirety on 18th April, 1906, and had been able to see what then took place, he would at the very least have been utterly amazed by the physical context of the event, even if the event itself, when seen from on high, seemed less than overwhelming.

For as context, the planet would have been memorably beautiful. Had he been standing on the moon, say—had he been a 1906 version of Neil Armstrong, scanning with a hugely powerful telescope the surface of the blue and green and white ball that was hanging in his ink-black sky—he would have seen illuminated in front of him (assuming that the cloud cover was not too dense) a tract of the world that extended from what some of mankind called India to what others called the Rocky Mountains, and all of which was bathed in the brilliant white light of sunshine.

At the moment that we find interesting—five o’clock on that western American morning, give or take—he could see the terminator-line of western darkness pushing its way rapidly towards the Pacific. The earth would be moving relentlessly at a speed of some hundreds of miles an hour eastwards towards it, opening ever more populated parts of the landmasses to the light of the dawning day.

“To the east of the line, all was bright and daylight. To its west, an impenetrable dark. And on the line itself, an uncertain penumbra of a few hundred miles of a swathe of half-dark and half-light.”

The line at this very moment seemed to begin in the north near Melville Island in the Canadian Arctic, pass on down through Banks Island and the unpopulated and ice-bound wilderness of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, through Saskatchewan and Alberta, raggedly on down through the newly created state of Montana, through bison-and-Cherokee country of Wyoming and Colorado and New Mexico, across the Rio Grande towards Acapulco and to a point on the coast where it finally slid away off the North American landmass and on eventually to illuminate the still-inky emptiness of the Pacific Ocean.

To the east of the line, all was bright and daylight. To its west, an impenetrable dark. And on the line itself, an uncertain penumbra of a few hundred miles of a swathe of half-dark and half-light. On earth itself this penumbral vagueness would translate itself into the morning twilights that early risers were experiencing just now in cities and on farms and in small villages all the way from Vancouver island in the north down to Baja California in the south, and where the day designated at the 18th of April was just about to begin.